EDITOR'S CHOICE -- SCOTT SUTTELL

Folks with fatter wallets are opening them up

Blog Entry: October 24, 2013 11:23 AM | Author: SCOTT SUTTELL

The economy is still so-so, and D.C. is still messed up, but consumers “are showing surprising signs of confidence, and opening their wallets to buy big-ticket items ranging from washing machines to fast boats,” according to this Wall Street Journal story that includes comments from a Cleveland analyst.

U.S. shipments of home appliances are growing at a rapid pace, and earnings and forecasts “also are up at other companies making pricier and more extravagant consumer products,” including motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, motor homes, trailers and other recreational vehicles, the newspaper says.

"The nerds and geeks are making tons of money," says Allen Sinai, chief economist at Decision Economics Inc., a Boston research firm, even as the typical American suffers from stagnant wages. The Journal notes that the average household in the top 20% of earners has seen its income rise more than 6% since 2008, before adjusting for inflation, according to data from the Census Bureau; among the top 5%, the increase has been nearly 8%.

Indeed, higher-income Americans "are finally beginning to start spending again," James Hardiman, an analyst at Longbow Research in Cleveland, tells The Journal.

As a result, he estimates retail sales of leisure boats made by Brunswick Corp. of Lake Forest, Ill., were up nearly 10% in the third quarter.

Retail sales of Harley-Davidson motorcycles were up 20% in the United States and 6.5% elsewhere in its most recent quarter, according to the story. But some perspective is in order. Despite Harley's rapid sales growth in the latest quarter, its U.S. retail sales for the full year still are likely to be about 35% below their 2006 peak, Mr. Hardiman tells The Journal

She's sold

Can a $400 blender change your life? It can when the product in question comes from Olmsted Falls-based Vitamix, according to this admiring Slate.com story by Catherine Price, the author of “101 Places Not to See Before You Die” who also writes about diabetes and food issues for asweetlife.org.

“The Vitamix is technically a blender. But calling it that seems like an insult: In quality and workmanship, the two just do not compare,” Ms. Price writes.

She was inspired by a 2012 Cook's Illustrated piece that put blenders to the test and gave raves to the Vitamix 5200.

After buying the blender, Ms. Price writes, “I decided to start my experiment with some “easy” recipes from the Vitamix cookbook (yes, the recipes go up to “advanced”): a garden cocktail, a spinach and strawberry smoothie, a strawberry and spinach lassi, a peach and banana shake. They were indeed easy — unlike my previous blender, which required constant stopping and restarting to coax the chunks of food into the blades, the Vitamix devoured whatever I put into it.”

She then moved on to soups, hummus and other healthy fare. And did well with all of them.

“If this just sounds like marketing fluff, I suggest doing a Twitter search for Vitamix,” she writes. “People tweet about hugging their Vitamixes. They post their favorite recipes (sample title: “Cucumber Joy”), and share photographs of bright green smoothies. And it's not just vegan, yoga-loving women, either.”

She concludes, “I recognize that I may at some point max out on Vitamix — today's frozen-kale-on-fresh-kale blend pushed the limit of what a banana can camouflage. But in the meantime, if my house catches fire, I know which appliance I'm grabbing on the way out.”

Tapping tablets

The Cleveland Clinic and other hospitals are “using tablet computers in ways that change the nature of treatment, from allowing doctors to diagnose patients without being physically present, to enabling clinicians to access patient information from anywhere,” according to this story from The Wall Street Journal.

The emergence of tablets “has allowed clinicians to access the data while on the go, which can accelerate treatment,” the story notes.

Hospitals are using tablets as part of the shift to meet Affordable Care Act requirements that emphasize care quality over the volume of procedures, Dr. Levin says. He tells The Journal that the Clinic is testing an iPad app that alerts doctors when patients take a turn for the worse.

“Equipped with tablets, emergency staff can scan the patient's electronic medical record for information about drug allergies and current treatments as they walk toward the patient's room,” according to the story. Dr. Levin says this helps attending staff to be better prepared to treat patients.

The Clinic also has developed an iPad application to test for concussions. When athletes absorb a brain-jarring hit, “a coach can strap an iPad onto the player's back and ask him walk around,” according to the story. “The iPad's gyroscope and accelerometer measure movements to detect balance problems that suggest symptoms consistent with a concussion.”

“Throughout my family's more than 170-year legacy of public service, Republicans have represented the voice of fiscal conservatism,” writes Mr. Taft, a cousin of recent two-term Ohio governor Bob Taft, in The New York Times.

“Republicans have been the adults in the room,” he writes. “Yet somehow the current generation of party activists has managed to do what no previous Republicans have been able to do — position the Democratic Party as the agents of fiscal responsibility.”

He says that in the recent government shutdown/debt ceiling showdown, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and other tea party figures “conveyed not the libertarian element in Republican philosophy that advocates for smaller government and less intrusion into the personal lives of citizens, but a new, virulent strain of empty nihilism: Blow it up if we can't get what we want.”

Then he goes pretty far, saying there is “more than a passing similarity between Joseph McCarthy and Ted Cruz, between McCarthyism and the tea party movement. The Republican Party survived McCarthyism because, ultimately, its excesses caused it to burn out. And eventually party elders in the mold of my grandfather were able to realign the party with its brand promise: The Republican Party is (or should be) the Stewardship Party. The Republican brand is (or should be) about responsible behavior. The Republican Party is (or should be) at long last, about decency.

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